Royersford Elementary students focus on caring' art project

ROYERSFORD — Through studying the work of noted artists, third graders from Royersford Elementary School are taking on the concept of character education to promote caring at their school.

“One thing that has always interested me as an educator is the development of the character of our students,” said Royersford art teacher Jennifer Low at a Spring-Ford Area School Board meeting Jan. 22.

Pennsylvania is “formally a state that ‘encourages’ character education,” which Low is employing in her classes, she said, to foster the “character traits of caring and respect.”

“I interviewed my classroom and surveyed my students to find out how they felt about my classroom and about the school in general,” Low said. “I discovered many good things. However, our students had nearly all felt teased or bullied or unsafe at one point or another within our school community.”

From that revelation, Low and her class decided to put their focus on respect.

The first class of the year included studying Michael Landy, who created posters for a project called “Acts of Kindness.” The project involved taking written observations of kindness observed throughout the London Underground system and incorporating them into a map of the subway system.

Taking inspiration from that, according to Low and her students, others took up their own kindness-driven art projects.

Emulating Landy, the third graders created their own project, “Acts of Caring.”

“We wanted to get everyone in our school thinking about, watching for and creating acts of kindness,” one student said at the school board meeting.

Low took written submissions from students of acts of kindness they witnessed, then printed them out and put them on the posters of a schoolhouse. Those posters were put up in various parts of Royersford Elementary.

A project taken on by Citta was teaching women in Nepal to knit pashmina scarves, The scarves the Nepalese women made were sold with the goal of building a school for girls in the area.

Low’s students intend to borrow Daube’s idea by creating stamps out of clay with illustrations of their favorite submissions from the Acts of Caring project.

The students will create ceramic pots with impressions from those stamps and show them at their art show in the spring. After the pots have been shown, they’ll be sold with the money going toward an as-yet-determined cause.

From the beginning, Low has been confident that projects like the ones her students have taken on through character education will positively influence the students at Royersford.

“I felt certain that art and character education could be blended seamlessly in a mutually enhancing way,” she said.